The Best of Everything

by Rona Jaffe

  "Down the hall and turn to your left," Caroline said. "She has her own office now. She's been promoted to doing publicity."

  "That's nice."

  "Would you like some books before you go?"

  "Books?" Mary Agnes said. "I don't know. Have you got anything good?"

  Caroline gestured to the bookcase. "Take anything you want."

  Mary Agnes glanced at the bookcase without moving. "Oh, I don't think so. Thanks just the same. Well, I'll be seeing you. So

  long-"

  "Goodbye," Caroline said. "Thanks for showing me the pictures."

  "You're welcome."

  When Mary Agnes had gone triumphantly down the hall to find April, Caroline felt relieved because she had a great deal of work to do, and then suddenly she found herself filled with an emotion which she could only recognize as envy. Mary Agnes knew what she was going to do tonight; she was going to be home with her husband and baby. She would not go to an empty apartment and wait for the telephone to ring, and put a few records on the phonograph (not sad ones, because they would be dangerous) and feed the cat, and finally make a sandwich because it seemed silly to cook and set the table for oneself. Perhaps, if she thought about it at all, Mary Agnes might have a fleeting stab of envy for Caroline, because Caroline would be eating an expensive lunch at Moriarity's with an author, and because on Friday she would be meeting Mary Agnes' favorite movie star. But at the time she would be thinking of Caroline and John Cassaro, Mary Agnes would be sitting in front of her television set, with her husband, in a home, and John Cassaro would be an image on a screen for a moment, someone who did not really quite exist except in daydreams. "Caroline is lucky," Mary Agnes might say to Bill, "she has such an interesting job." And she might even turn to him and ask, "Do you think I'm boring, honey?" But she wouldn't mean it for an instant, and her husband wouldn't even know what she was talking about. Boring? Half of his heart, the woman he loved? How could she be boring? Was life boring, was breathing boring, was serenity and calm and hope for the future dull?

  I could have all that, Caroline thought, with Paul. But then she knew she couldn't. She was not Mary Agnes and she never had been. Was it because she was now more demanding and hved at a more acute level of awareness, or because she was simply not in love? A person was good and kind and steadfast and perfectly presentable, and yet for some perverse reason you could not love him in return. Although Paul did not know it, it was as distiubing to her as it must have been to him. But I'm going to meet John Cassaro. Her heart turned over like an adolescent's. She had liked John Cassaro ever

  since she had been a teen-ager sitting in a dark movie theater enraptured with the romantic substitute for the boys who were still too young to take her out. But on Friday she was not going to meet him as an adolescent admirer, she was going to meet him as an editor and a woman. She was old enough now to be of interest to him, and he was not too old to be of interest to her. Maybe this was only a daydream, in a more realistic vein than the one she had had at fourteen, but she could not help having it. She was to be at his hotel apartment at eleven-thirty in the morning. She would have preferred to arrive late in the afternoon, the cocktail hour was more suggestive of personal relationships. But eleven-thirty in the morning was better than nothing. And it would give her something to think about until Friday, and that was the most important of all.

  As it turned out, she had something else to think about before Friday, something that nearly turned her private office world into a turmoil. On Wednesday afternoon at three o'clock Caroline saw Mr. Shalimar returning from lunch, walking down the hall arm in arm with Amanda Farrow. Miss Farrow—or Mrs. whatever her name now was—had a shiny walnut California suntan and she wore a sleeveless black linen dress to show it ofiF, with an armful of clanking golden bracelets. She looked expensive and polished and somehow worried. When she passed Caroline standing at the doorway of her office Miss Farrow glanced at her but did not even nod in recognition. She's back in New York, Caroline thought, I wonder why. Is it for a visit or for good? She hoped Miss Farrow was only visiting and did not want to come back to the office; things had just started to be peaceful without her. Half an hour later Mr. ShaHmar called Caroline into his office.

  "Sit down. Miss Bender," he said, folding his hands on the desk top in front of him. He looked more assured than he had the last time Caroline had been in his office, and that worried her, because she knew Mr. Shalimar was only self-assured when he knew he was making someone else uncomfortable. "Well," he said. "How is the work going?"

  "Fine," Caroline said, smiling.

  "You getting along all right?"

  "Yes, thank you. Everything's just fine."

  "Not too much for you, is it?"

  "Too much?"

  "I only wondered. I don't see you very often. You just stay in there in your little office all day."

  "That's because I'm working," Caroline said. "There are four books being completed this month that I have to edit, and I always try to keep up with the unsolicited pile just the same. YouVe always said that every one of us should consider the unsoliciteds as much of a responsibility as the established authors, because that's where we find the new blood." And Miss Farrow never bothered, she thought, hoping he would remember.

  "That's right," Mr. Shalimar said. He cocked his head at her as if it had just at that moment occurred to him. "Miss Farrow was in a while ago, I forgot to tell you. Did you see her?"

  "I saw her pass by," Caroline said.

  "She's going to be living in New York again."

  "Oh?"

  "It's too bad," he said, "her marriage didn't work out. She's getting a divorce. I guess she just couldn't keep away from us, eh?"

  Caroline smiled nervously.

  "You know," he said, "Miss Farrow was with us a long time."

  "Does she want to come back?"

  "Well, that's what I wanted to discuss with you. I don't know what there is for her to do. You've been doing a good job with her authors and I don't like to start upsetting things just when we have them running so smoothly."

  For the first time Caroline reahzed what he had been leading up to and she began to tense with resentment at the unfairness of it. "My authors like working with me," she said, trying to keep her voice low and calm. "You know they're all happy, and you've been happy with my work."

  Mr. Shalimar cleared his throat. "You have a great deal of work to do, now you know that," he said, as if he were chastising an unreasonable child. "Don't you think you could spare a few?"

  "Spare a few!" She could no longer control herself, her voice broke with emotion. "Authors are people, and sensitive ones at that. You can't just push them around from editor to editor. And what about me? Miss Farrow left, and I've been doing a fine job, you told me that. If she comes back she'll take all my authors, one by one, and I'll be a reader again. You know that's true."

  A faint smile crossed Mr. Shalimar's face. "You're very young to

  be an editor. You know you've been lucky. You don't have Miss Farrow's years of experience and yet you have her job."

  All right, you sadistic bastard, Caroline thought. If it's war, then it's war. "I don't have her years of experience," she said, "that's true. Neither do I take three hours for lunch, nor do I come in to the office at ten o'clock, nor do I leave at four, nor do I polish my nails at my desk instead of reading manuscripts. I don't send my secretary out on fool's errands to department stores when she's getting fifty dollars a week to type office correspondence. There were a lot of things going on here that you perhaps didn't know about, but I'll tell you if I have to. I hope I won't have to."

  Mr. Shalimar's smile broadened. '1 know about them," he said.

  "Then how can you suggest that you'll give half my job to her?"

  "1 want to be fair."

  "Fair? Fair to whom?"

  "We have to be fair," he said again, and then Caroline realized. Bossart had put him up to this, but whether Bossart wanted Miss Farrow back or was simply making th
e gesture and looking for a good excuse to tell her she could not retimi, Caroline could not figure out. She tried to calm herself enough to think quickly and clearly. Of course Mr. Bossart didn't want Miss Farrow back, she was bad for the company. He was an executive, after all, above everything else, and he could sleep with her on his own time if he wanted to. Miss Farrow had left of her own accord, she had made it easy for him. Caroline's heart was pounding. Ill make it easy for him too, she thought, if that's what he and Mr. ShaHmar want.

  "I know you're satisfied with my work," she said calmly. "I feel that the company owes me something too. I haven't asked for a great deal of money, I know I get much less than Miss Farrow did. I've been willing to wait and to do my best. But if you take away any of my authors I'm going to leave."

  Mr. Shalimar raised his eyebrows, but Caroline could see that despite himself he looked pleased. He did not say anything.

  She stood. "I guess that's all," she said, "unless there's anything else you'd like me to do. There's a manuscript I'm trying to finish before five o'clock so I can give you the report to take home. Your secretary said you'd like to have it."

  Mr. Shalimar tilted back in his swivel chair and crossed his feet on the desk. It was the first time Caroline had ever seen him do

  this, although April had told her he did it often in private. "Oh, yes," he said, "I would."

  She turned to go.

  "Caroline . . ."

  "Yes, sir?"

  He chuckled. "Sir. Don't be so formal. You've been working here a long time. I wouldn't start cleaning out my desk if I were you. I'd get rid of everybody else in the office before I'd let you get away."

  "Thank you."

  "We'll have a drink together one night," he said. "You let me know when you're free."

  "I will. Thank you."

  She left, shutting the door behind her, and she could have run down the hall with joy. It would be a cold day in hell before she would have a drink with Mr. Shalimar alone, but he didn't know that. And it really didn't matter. For the first time Caroline realized how much they needed her here. She was a good editor and they knew it. And she was so good that she was above office politics and secret knffings and social intrigues. She would never know whether or not she had been close to losing her position five minutes ago in Mr. Shalimar's office, but her few moments of panic had shown her how much her work here really meant to her. It had started out as a stopgap, but now it had become a way of life. It gave her a sense of value and of belonging. Perhaps that, besides ability, was what made her so good at the job that they could not now aflFord to lose her.

  On Thursday afternoon she did something she had not done in years. She bought two movie magazines to find articles about John Cassaro, and read them, wondering how much of the idolatrous, sugar-coated prose was really true. "John Cassaro—The Lonely Man," one of the pieces was entitled. There was a picture of him, the gaunt face and incredibly sexy mouth, the bright eyes that managed to be piercing and guileless at the same time. These magazines always like to tell the "true story," that a clown was sad—what else? How could a clown be happy, it would be too simple. And, of course, that a man who had a reputation as an o£F-stage great lover and scourge of chorus girls was really withdrawn and lonesome. Nevertheless, despite herself, it gave Caroline a strange kind of thrill to read this, as it must have given thousands of girls all over

  the country. He's lonely, they would say to themselves, no matter what a wild life he leads, he's never found the one girl who could understand him. After all, those chorus girls in Las Vegas, those starlets in Hollywood, they may be much prettier than I am but they only care about their careers. They probably think about themselves all the time, not about him, about the secret problems he could confess to them if they were really imderstanding. In the movies, in the magazine stories, the girl who tames the heel is the extraordinarily good girl, the white-collar and scrubbed-faced oflBce girl who hasn't been anywhere.

  "Why don't you get a copy of Unveiled?" Lorraine said. "They had a piece on John Cassaro a few months ago. Do you want me to go downstairs and get it for you?"

  'Tes, please," Caroline said, thinking how already this girl was trying to anticipate her every demand in her anxiety to get ahead. Lorraine went quickly out of the office, and Caroline looked after her, trim in her new, conservative cotton dress, and she thought, Oh, God, I'm getting just like Miss Farrow. There's nothing about this girl not to trust, she's just a nice girl, and she wants to please me. If at this stage in my career I have to be afraid of an eighteen-year-old newcomer, then I'm nowhere. But she could not help wondering whether it would always be like this now because that was the way things were.

  Lorraine was back in three minutes flat. "Thank you," Caroline said, taking the magazine, which had already been opened and folded back to the article she wanted.

  "Not at all."

  "Good grief, how can they print such garbage?"

  There were several murky photographs showing figures skulking about in shrubbery, and one good picture of a luxurious Las Vegas hotel. There was a photograph taken in a night club at a different time showing John Cassaro sitting with a pretty girl and looking into her eyes with a foxy smile. It had probably been a publicity date, but Unveiled didn't say that. The article was entitled, "The Night the Virgin's Mother Knocked on John Cassaro's Door." It went on to tell, without actually saying anything, that a twenty-one-year-old girl had been madly in love with her movie idol and had been drinking with him in his hotel suite when her mother and her rejected twenty-two-year-old boy friend had invaded the premises,

  finding (the magazine finally admitted) nothing. But by the time you got to the end of the article and groped your way through the leering, sneering prose it had been written in, you would think that there had been all manner of obscene orgies going on.

  "I couldn't figure out," Lorraine said, "whether they had been doing anything or not."

  "Neither can Unveiled" Caroline said disgustedly. "They get their pictures from old newspaper files and movie magazines and make up half their scandal at their editorial meetings."

  "Can they do that?"

  "They're doing it."

  "Somebody's going to sue them someday," Lorraine said.

  "For what? Read this. They were in Las Vegas and they were in his room together. They could have been playing Old Maid, and the article never said they weren't. But it was so damned sarcastic all the way through that it was just like being insulted with every line without his ever having anything to say he was insulted about."

  "I don't care," Lorraine said indignantly. "I'd go out with him in a minute if he asked me. Wouldn't you?"

  Caroline smiled. "It would be a good way to get hurt."

  "Hurt? Why?"

  "Just take my word for it. I've been doing some research on the subject. He has quite a reputation, Unveiled magazine or not. He never takes a girl out more than once."

  "Well, one date isn't long enough to get hurt," Lorraine said.

  "With him, it evidently is."

  Lorraine opened her eighteen-year-old eyes wide with shocked delight. "You mean . . ."

  "I don't know," Caroline said, trying to put an end to the discussion. "I wasn't there, and so I don't know."

  But she saw Lorraine smiling to herself as she went about her typing and filing, and Caroline wondered whether even this levelheaded and ambitious young girl was thinking secretly that if she ever went out with John Cassaro she would be the exception. Girls always think, "I am going to be the exception," Caroline thought; it's a weakness of the species, like a collie's tiny brain. She herself had often heard that John Cassaro was supposed to be an unforgettable lover, but somehow she felt that even to dwell on this possibility in her mind was rather cheap and childish. He was a real person, with

  a private life, and she was going to meet him that way in less than twenty-four hours, not as an imaginary bedroom partner but as a business contact. To think of it any other way would be bad for her, she knew that,
whether he thought of her as a girl or not.

  But that night she washed and set her hair, and in the morning she took a great deal of care with her make-up, telling herself that it was all for the good of Derby Books. She reached his hotel at exactly eleven-thirty and when she rode up in the elevator she wondered whether the elevator man knew where she was going. As she rang the bell to his suite she was thinking, Who's John Cassaro? Nobody. But she was overtaken with fright.

  She had expected a sinister oriental houseboy, but Cassaro opened the door himself. He looked exactly as he did in his photographs, a littie older perhaps, a little tliinner. He was forty, she knew, but a very young forty.

  "You must be Caroline Bender," John Cassaro said.

  "Yes."

  "Come in."

  He was wearing a navy-blue silk dressing gown and actually had a silk scarf tucked around his throat. It was exactly as she had imagined he would look in the morning. As she followed him into the living room, Caroline realized to her surprise that he was much taller than she had expected him to be. Perhaps because of the deh-cate bones of his face she had expected him to be small, but he was not, he was nearly six feet tall.

  The living room was air conditioned, as was the entire suite, and it had a piano in one corner. It was a huge room, with pale carpeting and pale walls, and the blinds were opened to the brilliant summer sunlight. At one end of the room there was a door leading to a large terrace, and beyond the terrace wall Caroline could see the city sky line. I must remember everything, she thought, to tell Gregg and April.

  "Would you like some coffee?" John Cassaro asked.

  "That would be lovely."

  "I just got up," he said.

  There was a coffee table in front of the sofa, with a hotel coffee service set upon it. Caroline had somehow expected a fat manager to be sitting in the comer chewing a damp cigar, or some hangers-on